What's with all this about "rising third-year student" or "rising articles editor," where "rising" means "incoming" (e.g., someone who is about to enter his third year or has been selected to become an articles editor on the new editorial board)? I've been seeing it a lot over the last few months, and I don't recall ever seeing it before. Some queries do reveal that the term has been around for at least several years, and the meaning seems related to some old meanings that I saw noted in the OED, but it just seems to me that is has suddenly become much more common.

I find the term somewhat annoying (not wrong, just annoying) in the way that new jargon will sometimes (but not always) strike people as annoying, especially when there's a good substitute for the term ("incoming," as I said) and the term seems vaguely self-congratulatory. But that's an esthetic judgment that's hard to argue about. I was hoping that someone might enlighten me about the more descriptive matters of whether the term is indeed getting more popular, and why.